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CHAPTER XXXVI: Chowder
Corn Chowder. 1 can corn, 1 quart potato cubes (parboiled), 1 tablespoonful chopped fat pork, sliced onion, 1 quart scalded milk, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, Salt and pepper.
Put the corn through a meat chopper, fry the onion and the pork a light brown, strain the fat into a stewpan, add the corn, potato cubes, the milk, seasoning, and butter, thicken with a little flour, and pour over split crackers.
Lobster Chowder. 1 pound lobster, 1 quart milk, 3 crackers, + cupful butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, ½ teaspoonful white pepper, 1 teaspoonful cayenne pepper.
Boil 1 quart milk. Roll 3 crackers fine; mix with them 1 cupful butter, and the green fat of the lobster. MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Season with 1 scant teaspoonful salt, ½ teaspoonful white pepper, and + teaspoonful cayenne pepper. Pour the boiling milk gradually over the paste. Put it back in the double boiler; add the lobster meat cut into dice; let it boil up once, and serve.-MARY J. LINCOLN.
Sorrel Soup (French recipe). 3 pints boiling water, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, cupful shredded sorrel, 3 tablespoonfuls milk, 1 teaspoonful salt, Yolk 2 eggs, cupful bread cut in dice and dried in the oven or fried in butter.
Tear the tender green parts from the midribs of the cultivated sorrel; wash in cold water and shred very fine. Put half the butter in a stewpan and add the shredded sorrel. Place on the fire and cook five minutes, stirring frequently. Now add the boiling water and salt, and boil ten minutes. Beat the yolks of eggs well, add the milk, pour into the soup tureen, and add the remaining half of the butter cut into bits. Gradually pour the boiling hot soup in the tureen, stirring all the while to combine the hot mixture with the egg yolk. Add the bread dice, and serve. -MARIA PARLOA.
Black-Bean Soup. 1 pint black beans, 2 quarts cold water, 1 small onion, 2 stalks celery or 1 teaspoonful celery salt, tablespoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, 1 teaspoonful mustard, Few grains cayenne, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonfuls flour, 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 lemon.
Soak beans over night; in the morning, drain and add cold water.
Slice onion, and cook five minutes with half the butter, adding to the beans, with celery stalks broken in pieces. Simmer three or four hours, or until beans are soft; add more water as it boils away. Rub through a sieve, reheat to the boiling point, and add salt, pepper, mustard, and cayenne well mixed. Bind with remaining butter and flour cooked together. Cut eggs in thin slices, also lemon, removing seeds. Put in tureen, and strain the soup over them. -FANNIE MERRITT FARMER.
Chicken Chowder.
Take the remains of a stewed chicken, cut the meat off the bones and with a scissors clip it into small pieces; put the bones in a kettle with cold water, adding any left-over chicken gravy, and let them stew till all the good is out of the meat.
Strain, add 1 quart milk to each quart chicken stock, a tablespoonful minced onion, fried with a tablespoonful salt pork, 2 cupfuls parboiled potato cubes, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, the cut-up chicken, and flour enough to thicken slightly; salt and pepper to taste.
A cluster of Boston Cooking School–era soups, reprinted here with the fraction marks mangled — several quantities show as "+" or bare "cupful" where the original had ¼ or ½. Read the amounts with that in mind before you start measuring.
- The broken fractionsIn the lobster chowder, "+ cupful butter" and "+ teaspoonful cayenne" are printing casualties for some lost fraction; a quarter-cup of butter and a small pinch of cayenne are the likely readings. The 1 teaspoonful cayenne in the ingredient column also contradicts the "+ teaspoonful" in the method \ ord of milk would be punishing. Sorrel soup's "cupful shredded sorrel" and "cupful bread dice" were probably ½ cup each.
- Green fat of the lobsterThis is the tomalley, the olive-green hepatopancreas in the body cavity. It thickens and flavors the chowder, and it is edible in a cooked lobster, though current advice is to eat it sparingly because it concentrates contaminants.
- Lobster timing"Let it boil up once" is the whole point. The lobster meat is already cooked; more than a minute in hot milk turns it fibrous, and the milk with cracker paste in it will catch on the bottom of a direct pan — hence the double boiler.
- Split crackersThese are Boston common crackers or hardtack, split through the middle and laid in the bowl as a base. Unsalted saltines or plain water biscuits stand in; oyster crackers stirred through work too, though they soften faster.
- Canned corn through a meat chopperCanned corn of the period was often packed whole-kernel and firm, which is why it needed chopping. A few pulses in a food processor, or a brief go with an immersion blender in the pan, gives the same half-crushed texture. A can of this date held roughly a pound, so one standard modern can is the closer reading of "1 can."
- Straining out the pork fatThe corn chowder strains the rendered fat into the stewpan and discards the onion and pork scraps. Leave them in and expect a heavier, smokier soup than intended.
- Tempering the sorrel soupThe egg yolks go into the cold tureen and the boiling soup is poured over them while stirring. Pour slowly and keep the whisk moving — dumped in at once, the yolks scramble and no amount of straining recovers the texture. Do not reheat the finished soup.
- Sorrel itselfCultivated garden sorrel, sold at farmers' markets in spring; it collapses to a khaki purée in five minutes and tastes sharply of lemon. Cook it in a non-reactive pan, as the oxalic acid takes a metallic edge off aluminum and bare cast iron.
- Salt in the black-bean soup"Tablespoonful salt" is aggressive by current taste. The recipe already adds it at the end, after sieving and reheating, so work up from less and taste as you go.
- YieldsThese vary: the lobster and sorrel soups run to about six cups, the corn chowder considerably more. The chicken chowder is a leftovers recipe and scales to whatever the carcass gives you.
The word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudière, a cauldron, by way of the fishing coasts of Brittany and Newfoundland, and by the nineteenth century it named a whole New England family of milk-and-potato soups served over broken or split crackers — though, as two of the recipes here show, flour thickening was common enough by this date. What is striking about this page is the company: the recipes are credited to Mary J. Lincoln, Maria Parloa, and Fannie Merritt Farmer, three of the presiding figures of the Boston Cooking School, whose books were being freely quoted and cross-quoted in household compendia like this one. The corn and chicken chowders show the form loosened from fish entirely — once the technique existed, anything at hand went into it — while the sorrel soup, flagged as a "French recipe" and finished with raw egg yolk in the tureen, is the older continental practice that the school-trained American cooks were self-consciously importing.